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It’s about the people

As Peace Corps Volunteers we sometimes find ourselves saying, “I could do my job if it weren’t for these damn people.” It’d be so much funnier if we could catch ourselves in the irony. But we get caught up, rather, in the frustrations of trying to get things done in the ways we want to do them, on our time, under our conditions, for our own goals.

I believe every volunteer is here because they want to help people. I can think of about 187 other places I could go to take a two-year vacation, and despite their obvious draws and benefits, I’m also not here for the sheep fat dinners, pit toilets or bi-monthly bathing sessions. But I do enjoy shooting the breeze around a meal, digging a hole with a neighbor and the occasional back scrub at the local sauna from a newfound friend.

The give and take is found here too – it starts here in fact, in the day-to-day stuff that makes up so much of our experiences. In order to help people we first get to know who they are, what they want and how they want to go about getting it. It’s their goals we’re after, and if it’s through our methods, then we have adapted them to make sense to the people whom they benefit. The Peace Corps wouldn’t be here if there weren’t things that needed to be changed, but we have to remember that in the end it’s not about procedures but about relationships. Yes, it’s going to be frustrating at times. But that’s because we’re working with people. And that’s why we’re here.

Call your family

You are driving in a car with your wife and mother on the way to a party. While crossing a river, another car swerves and causes you to go careening off the edge into the water. As the car is sinking you realize you only have time to save one person, either your mother, or your wife. Whom do you save?

This question was presented to us in a cultural anthropology class I took in college. It was a scenario from a study that had been done some years before. I still remember the Saudi men’s overwhelming majority answer: Mother, of course. You only have one. You can always get another wife.

While I can’t say that answer would come so easily for me (sorry mom?), I like to think the Saudi men’s answers show a deep devotion toward family more so than a lack of concern for a drowning wife…?

As Peace Corps volunteers we’re given 48 days of leave that can be used throughout the two years of service. This time can be used to travel in country, but most people use a lot of their time for out of country travel to neighboring “far-off” places since plane tickets are cheap and, heck! we have the time. At Christmas break and after seven months in country, I was one of only two volunteers who made the trip back to the States. The reasons for not going back were varied: insufficient funds, too soon, rather go somewhere else, and not wanting to see what is being missed. I don’t think there’s a single Peace Corps Volunteer who doesn’t miss friends and family they’ve left behind, but for me, those reasons simply couldn’t hold a candle to how much I missed people back home.

My parents will be my parents for life. My sisters won’t ever stop being my sisters. And because they’re family I want to keep getting to know them and continue these very significant relationships in my life. It was really hard to leave again and return to Kyrgyzstan, but I am so happy for each memory we made back home.

I try to live by few mantras, and “Let the wife drown” certainly hasn’t made the select list. Yet, a piece of paper ripped from a notebook is taped to the wall above my desk. Scrawled there bubble letters it reads, “Call your fam.” It’s a decision I never regret.

Life is really, really hard. And then it gets harder. And then you die.

Several years ago I came up with a relative definition of “adult.” The more responsibility you have, the more of an adult you are. This definition is not based on age, or even experience, but rather on a level of assumed responsibility. That means a 22-year-old with a spouse, two kids, full time job and house payment is more of an adult than the 35-year-old living in an apartment with a part-time job and an xbox. (As if that was hard to tell.) But I think the definition works for more nuanced situations as well.

Horses don’t just slaughter themselves, you know

Life is going to be hard whether you live as a 22-year-old producer or 35-year-old siphon. That’s the short of it. Yet the more responsibility you take on, the more complicated and difficult it becomes. Add to that a determination to live for God and you have a divine edict promising it will be.

Life is really, really hard, and then it gets harder, and then you die. This is actually a hopeful realization. It means that the difficulties in life are to be expected and that there isn’t full joy until we see Jesus face to face on the other side of this life. It allows us to not get frustrated when what we thought would bring us joy just ends up being a burden.

The joy comes not in the things themselves, nor in the work itself. Our tilled earth is cursed and nothing grows without toil. But just as God promises hardships, he also promises a measure of joy surpassing the hardship when the work is done for Him.

So keep working. And don’t let the work be done in vain. Life is really hard with or without God. But with God, there is hope.

I miss home like hell

And by that I mean I miss it in a way that is exactly opposite of how I miss hell. I left my family, friends, language, culture, food, church, holidays, hobbies, ways of dealing with stress, support networks, country and that comfortable feeling of knowing you’re “home.” I sometimes pinch myself to see if I’m dreaming; am I really stuck in the middle of nowhere for two years?

But then I think about Nazgul, my counterpart. She’s never left an area the size of southern Minnesota, except this isn’t Minnesota at all but an equally tiny sliver of known universe lost up the side of a mountain. If I hadn’t been flung here in a Peace Corps blessed aircraft, I never would have met her. I never would have met any of these people, walking to school, planting their crops, building houses and flour mills and barns, driving their animals to pasture and driving them home again at night. People with stories as big as the open sky and bright as the stars that wash the valley. People who will spend half their paycheck to make sure you feel welcomed.

People ask me sometimes what I think is better, America or Kyrgyzstan. I answer, “America, or course. It’s my home.” “Ah, you must miss it,” they say wistfully, their minds wandering to nearer mountains and land well loved. “Oh home beloved where e’er I wander…” is what my heart starts to sing, “Though fair be nature’s scenes around me and friends are ever tried and true…”

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The truth of it is, I’m going to miss this place too. I think everyone misses it when they’re gone, and you have to let that future knowledge affect your appreciation for the place today, no matter how shitty things are going or how fed-up you are with the whole lot. We miss things. And we’re going to miss this.

There’s something about shoveling manure that’s good for a man’s soul

Now admittedly I’m coming at this from the angle of the weekend dabbler – like the man who works in an office all week and then hauls some rock in his yard on Saturday and feels tough. If I were a farmer for a living I’d probably feel differently about the manual labor, but at the present I feel pretty good about my blister.

I think it’s the work specifically that does it. Manure means cows. Cows means production. Production means provision and that there, gentlemen, is what each of our souls strives for. We’re getting dirty. We’re getting involved.

It’s like God who stooped down into the mire of His creation, choosing to be born of the very dust into which He first breathed life. I’m so above a cow and I think that also puts me above what comes out his rear, but for a higher goal I’ll spend a day pushing it around.

Unlike God, we can’t get rid of it. I have no way of dealing with the stuff other than to turn it into a neatly stacked pile, or burn it to heat my bath. And don’t think burning is efficient removal. Then you get to push around a pile of manure ash.

And this too is good for the soul. You watch it carefully. Cool it indoors for a day. Gingerly sift it onto the ash pile watching for any remaining embers. You don’t want to miss one and inadvertently burn your house down. That would be the opposite of provision. Whatever that might be. And so we provide. The cows are fed, the udders are milked, the calves are sold and the manure is shoveled. And it is well with my soul.